Live Cams 3.0 currently under review

The Apple review team has sent me an email to let me know that they are currently reviewing the 3.0 release of Live Cams.This is great news! I feel that the performance improvements in the 3.0 release will once again propel the application to the top of the charts (at least in some countries I hope!).

Also coming in 3.0 is a GREATLY improved public cameras database with many of the dead feeds eliminated. I have also re-employed my original approach to managing this list without the need for further app store reviews. Here’s how it works:

When you are on cell networks it uses the last cached copy of public cameras and doesn’t download any new content. This should help to keep the startup time nice and short and keep your data usage to a minimum.

When you connect to a Wifi network it will look for the latest camera list. If anything has changed since it last checked, it will download the new content and merge your changes (private cams and favorites) and then launch. If nothing has changed it will simply launch and let you begin to surf the world.

All told there are about 4000 cameras in the current list, with about 800 of these being disabled to to password protection, dead links and inappropriate content (I try not to include cameras inside people’s homes, or at children’s daycares, etc). I may have missed some but I will eventually scan the whole list and prune out the invalid stuff. There are still a few hundred dead links I think but I can now chip away at this day by day and you will get the latest list every time you connect via Wifi.

Please be aware that Axis 2100 devices will now only work with the proper profile. If you have added private cameras under the default Axis profile they will no longer load. The reason for this is that the 2100 series cameras do not support thumbnail images with the same resolution as the others and they need a unique profile to account for this.